Exemplum William Faulkner, A Fable (1954)

ON the eve of the publication of A Fable (1954), William Faulkner believed the novel would be his magnum opus, a crowning achievement atop his glorious literary career. In a 1953 letter, he wrote:

I know now—believe now—that [A Fable] may be the last major, ambitious work; there will be short things, of course. I know now that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of the barrel. . . . And now I realise for the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I dont [sic] know where it came from. I dont know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement. (1977, 348)

Faulkner began the novel in 1943 as a project with the movie director Henry Hathaway, who, with his producer William Bacher, sought to make a film inspired by legends about “the Unknown Soldier” buried under the Arc de Triomphe after the First World War. In the decade that followed, Faulkner worked tirelessly—even monomaniacally—at what his biographer Joseph Blotner describes as a book “far more complicated and protracted than he could possibly have imagined” (452).

A Fable’s composition was a grueling process. During the Second World War, Faulkner’s drinking intensified as his income and family life grew increasingly unstable. Malcolm Cowley’s publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946) vaulted Faulkner back onto the public stage, and he was often compelled to “put the big mss. aside” (1977, 262) for smaller (and probably financially necessary) diversions like Intruder in the Dust (1948), Knight’s Gambit (1949), and Requiem for a Nun (1951). By the time A Fable appeared in 1954, Faulkner was at the pinnacle of his critical and public acclaim. He described the basic plot of the novel in a letter to Robert K. Hass dated January 15, 1944:

Christ (some movement in mankind which wished to stop war forever) reappeared and was crucified again. We are repeating, we are in the midst of war again. Suppose Christ gives us one more chance, will we crucify him again, perhaps for the last time.

That’s crudely put; I am not trying to preach at all. But that is the argument: We did this in 1918; in 1944 it not only MUST NOT happen again, it SHALL NOT HAPPEN again. i.e. ARE WE GOING TO LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN? now that we are in another war, where the third and final chance might be offered us to save him.

(1977, 180)

A Fable is a Passion Week allegory set in the trenches of France in May 1918. In this late modernist take on T. S. Eliot’s “mythic method,” Faulkner finds in the Gospel stories a pattern and a set of symbols for making sense of the chaos and violence of the First World War. Like Virgil’s Aeneid, A Fable engages the anxieties of its own historical moment through a retreat into a fictionalized past; and like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), it retells an ancient story, set in a slightly earlier historical moment than the time of its composition.

A Fable centers Stefan, a French corporal who is the novel’s most obvious Christ figure, and the rebellion he organizes in defiance of the General of the French army, a cynical autocratic warlord ultimately revealed to be his own father. The Corporal leads a regiment of 3,000 soldiers in mutiny by refusing to leave the trench when ordered into battle, inspiring the German enemy line to do the same; when word of the mutiny spreads, the remaining forces on the Western Front emulate them, resulting in a week-long recess to the war. The novel opens just after the French regiment’s mutiny and records the events of this “false armistice in May, that curious week’s holiday which the war had taken which had been so false” (“Tomorrow,” 1039). It concludes when Corporal Stefan is “crucified” by his father and then “resurrected” when his corpse, through a series of freak accidents, is buried as the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. Only the reader, however, is aware of the identity of the body. Faulkner’s realist rendering of the Christ narrative strips the story of its fantastical elements (like literal bodily resurrection), and the novel concludes on a note of dull, tragic irony. The basic message of this conclusion is clear: as Joseph Gold writes, “Faulkner seems to be saying that the fate of Christ in the society of man is to be always present but never recognized” (114–115).

Excepting chunks of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) set in Massachusetts, A Fable is Faulkner’s only novel that takes place outside the US South. In an attempt to generalize the major themes of his writing, Faulkner departed from the local contexts on which he typically drew and set the novel in France, which represented for him a kind of global symbol of human freedom. In an admirable but illiterate effort to write a French address upon being made an officer of the Legion of Honor, Faulkner named France “la mere universelle des artists” [“the universal mother of artists”] and “la mere de la liberte de l’homme et de l’esprit humaine” [“the mother of freedom of man and of the human spirit”] (2004, 125). The novel itself extends this attitude, describing French as “that tongue which of all is international” (“Wednesday Night,” 914). The realist settling of A Fable situates its literal narrative in the concrete context of the First World War and the Western Front, but Faulkner wanted its theme to be global. When describing the project, he preferred words like “story,” “fable,” or simply “big manuscript” to “novel” or “narrative.” In a 1947 letter, he wrote: “If the book can be accepted as a fable, which it is to me, the locale and contents wont [sic] matter” (1977, 247).

Originally intended to be no longer than 15,000 words, the novel as published in 1954 is almost 500 pages long and approximately 160,000 words. During the composition process, Faulkner seems to have viewed himself as an epic poet of the new age, a sort of latter-day Homer, Virgil, or Milton. He called A Fable his “indictment of war” in 1943 (1977, 178); in 1945 he declared, “[A Fable] may be my epic poem” (1977, 191), then later compared it to “a War and Peace close enough to home, our times, language, for Americans to really buy it” (1977, 238). In various letters, invoking Milton’s Paradise Lost, he called the book’s mythic structure its “argument.” Critics and readers have extended this line of thinking, and many draw comparisons to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The novel’s structure is encyclopedic, told across a constellation of symbolically charged scenes that all somehow point back to the story of Corporal Stefan’s mutiny. Out of a montage of realist episodes, Faulkner assembles an epic-scale psychological allegory charged with a politically subversive message.

A Fable is the masterpiece of the “late Faulkner” heralded by Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust. Accordingly, we must bear in mind Theodor Adorno’s well-known dictate, “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged . . . and they show more traces of history than of growth” (564). A Fable is a singular work in the Faulkner corpus. In its length, its flat, almost Bunyanesque characters, and its deliberate patterning of the Gospel story, there is evidence of the emptying-out of subjectivity, the “role of conventions,” and the “overabundance of material” (565–566) that Adorno finds in the late Beethoven and Goethe. Part of an artist’s late period, argues Shakespeare scholar Gordan McMullan in his elaboration on Adorno’s account, involves “a return to something earlier, even to something frankly primitive, along perhaps a tendency towards typology or, more intrusively, mythopoeia” (44). A Fable does without the nuanced awareness of human behavior and social psychology that Faulkner demonstrated in his earlier novels; this late work functions principally through myth and allegory. Conventional types and symbols appear almost unchanged in the narrative, such as the ring of barbed wire above the Corporal’s head at his execution. Faulkner was not alone in his late-career mythopoetic impulse; two years after the publication of A Fable, for example, his contemporary John Steinbeck began work on a retelling of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, published in unfinished form in 1976. Making sense of the difficulty of A Fable’s myth begins in acknowledging the “furrowed, even ravaged” quality of its formal construction. At the levels of character, setting, and plot, Faulkner’s attention is turned away from the subjective particulars of human experience, toward the creation of a myth of humanity.

A Fable’s critique of contemporary war culture involves a radical reimagining of the nature of the individual personality and its constitutive influences. Again like Joyce’s Ulysses, Faulkner orients himself against a Biblical emphasis on relationships of patrilinear descent and consubstantial paternity. The Corporal’s father, referred to only as the “Generalissimo” or the “Old General,” is the novel’s part-God part-Satan figure who represents war, political and military institutions, and the status quo—a far cry from the loving omnipotent New Testament Father or the exacting but ultimately benevolent judge that Milton portrays in Paradise Lost. Faulkner’s decision to identify the Old General by antonomasia rather than personal name both sets up the character’s primary function as a de-individualized allegorical figure and, in contrast to Corporal Stefan, asserts the inhumanity of what he represents; further, the use of the superlative title “Generalissimo” sets him up as a figure of absolute power in its highest and least refined form, playing on its primary associations with the Spanish Civil War general and dictator Francisco Franco to exaggerate basic relationships between military power, orthodox conservatism, and repressive authoritarianism dramatized in the novel.

Given these associations, it is unsurprising that the duty of A Fable’s Corporal is directed away from the Old General, unlike the Biblical Christ whose primary duty remains uncompromisingly towards God the Father. Corporal Stefan must—like Charles Bon in the earlier Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—disrupt the grand design of his father, undermining the legitimacy of consubstantial paternity as a ground of moral obligation. The Old General’s final remark to the Corporal, “Remember whose blood it is that you defy me with” (“Thursday Night,” 996), stresses the Corporal’s rebellion against the very substance which constitutes him. Faulkner’s Christ is a figure both of love, peace, and humility and of revenge, renunciation, and rebellion. Eleanor Cook argues that Faulkner had already experimented with the subversion of typological hermeneutics in Go Down, Moses in a way that “radically questions orthodox typology” (694); in the novel, Ike McCaslin—like Corporal Stefan—is tempted with his family inheritance and must renounce it. In A Fable, as in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner disrupts basic dimensions of the Christ type in the New Testament in order to interrupt the usual accordance between the two poles of a typological relationship. A Fable’s heterodox typology directs the reader’s attention away from relationships of consubstantial paternity, toward the human individual’s capacity for isolated exercises of freedom.

Additionally, A Fable’s emphasis on the potential of the human individual is positioned against dominant models of the nation-state. Faulkner resists the Aristotelian political naturalism which claims that “man by nature is a political animal” and that “the state is clearly prior to the family and to the individual” (3). This view is parodied in the novel by, for instance, the German general who claims, “Our national destiny is for glory and war” (“Wednesday Night,” 946). A Fable understands the concept of nation as an essentially imagined concept which proceeds from, and does not precede, human language use. The group commander explains it to Division Commander Charles Gragnon, who bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of the mutinous regiment:

“Let the whole vast moil and seethe of man confederate in stopping wars if they wish, so long as we can prevent them from learning that they have done so. A moment ago you said that we must enforce our rules, or die. It’s no abrogation of a rule that will destroy us. It’s less. The simple effacement from man’s memory of a single word will be enough. But we are safe. Do you know what that word is?”

The division commander looked at him for a moment. He said: “Yes?”

“Fatherland,” the group commander said. (“Monday, Monday Night,” 715–716)

The group commander in this moment is an ironic mouthpiece for what might be the most explicit anti-war claim in A Fable: the “simple effacement from man’s memory” of the concept of nation or “Fatherland” as an organizing category “will destroy” the conditions necessary to even imagine the mere possibility of global warfare. In other words, if the concept of nation were eliminated as a means of thinking about the world, the very idea of international war would stop making sense. “A Fable suggests,” Joseph Urgo writes, “that the ideological struggle among nations is a false construction fabricated by the authorities in order to maintain control over their civil populations” (109). For Faulkner, the notion of “Fatherland” as a concept through which the individual relates to the world is as flimsy and contingent as the illogical performative boundaries of twentieth-century US race ideals that fail Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932).

In Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (2010), Robert Genter argues that US writers during the Cold War responded to anxieties about mounting totalitarian power structures with an increased attention to “the rhetorical nature of all forms of symbolic action” (281) and the power of works of art to shape public discourse. Faulkner was also affected by these energies during the composition of A Fable, and the novel’s experimentation with rhetoric and idiosyncratic realist stylization represents an important development towards a novelistic form capable of exploiting the latent ideological functions of written narrative. In response to the “general and universal physical fear” (2004, 119) of the nuclear bomb he identified in his Nobel address, he designed A Fable as a powerful social object intended to manipulate the public imagination. The novel’s pedagogy works by taking advantage of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “the artist’s imaginative mobility” (232); Faulkner, targeting atavistic patriarchal and nationalist models, seeks to communicate new “kinds of behavior” and “models of practice” (226) that stress the potential of the human individual. “[T]he mistake we have consistently made is setting nation against nation or political ideology against ideology to stop war,” he wrote in an unpublished note to the novel; rather, people

must be taught to abhor war not for moral or economic reasons, or even for simple shame, but because they are afraid of it, dare not risk it since they know that in war they themselves—not as nations or governments or ideologies, but as simple human beings vulnerable to death and injury—will be the first to be destroyed.

(2004, 270)

A Fable was for Faulkner a rhetorical as well as an aesthetic project. Making use of the literary text’s function as a regulator of social boundaries, Faulkner reconfigured dominant ideological forms and fashioned a moral reading practice designed to rehabilitate the fallen society of the Cold War US. The novel resists ties of family and nation and prescribes, positively, an absolute attention toward the human individual as such.

Despite these lofty ambitions, A Fable’s reception was largely negative. David Minter expresses what remains the typical reaction to the novel: “despite moments in which it is nearly as good as Faulkner wanted it to be, A Fable . . . is not only strained and awkward; it is too deliberate and too self-conscious, too direct and too abstract” (227). Its message is couched in hermetic Latinate syntax, shadowy and impersonal characters, and—perhaps most confusingly—fragmented and morally ambiguous allegory; as Minter puts it, “What are we to make of a Christ-like protagonist whose father has an affiliation with war that forces him to play both tempter and destroyer of his son?” (227). For these reasons, many readers come away from the novel with little more than the vague sense of an anti-war sentiment, a proposed imitatio Christi, or a renewed belief in humanity. Still, there is scattered praise across the novel’s critical history: Delmore Schwartz in 1955 wrote that A Fable was a “masterpiece” and a “unique fulfillment of Faulkner’s genius which gives a luminous new meaning to his works as a whole” (292); Joseph Urgo in 1989 named it “Faulkner’s supreme articulation of his apocryphal production” (94); and in 2021, Michael Wainwright wrote that the book “answers” Theodor Adorno’s charge that to write poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric through “responsible distancing” and that it is of “seminal importance to [Faulkner’s] canon” (246).

Nevertheless, there was ample precedent in English literary history for the book. F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition (1948) identifies “the moral fable” as a class of realist novels, citing as examples Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), Henry James’ The Europeans (1878), and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). In these novels, “the symbolic and representative values are inevitable, and, sufficiently plain at once, yield fresh subtleties as the action develops naturally in its convincing historical way” (20); at their best, as in Nostromo, the “dramatic imagination at work is an intensely moral imagination” (30). Insofar as it represents concrete agents like Corporal Stefan, the Old General, and Division Commander Charles Gragnon navigating the concrete social and political institutions of war, A Fable participates in this kind of novelistic discourse. At the same time, however, the novel’s highly symbolic, dreamy register and protracted allegorical structure problematize its feeling of reality; the moral fable is not, as Leavis would have it, effectively “realized in terms of a substantial real world” (46). This shortcoming is responsible for much of A Fable’s failure to effectively engage the public imagination. Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice (1995) argues that novels of the sort described by Leavis play a part in the formation of adequate moral faculties in a reading public. Realist novels, she writes, “invite their readers to put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and to take on their experiences” (5); for this reason, reading them “can be a bridge both to a vision of justice and to the social enactment of that vision” (12). A Fable, however, fails to present characters and situations concrete enough to support this sort of experience. Its moral intensity and the nuance of its theme are lost to a reading experience that foregoes the feeling of real characters in a real world.

In this “last major ambitious work,” Faulkner used the epic spirit as a vehicle for a universal myth of humanity with reach far beyond Yoknapatawpha County. A Fable, in response to anxieties about totalitarian forms of power after the Second World War, marshaled the rhetorical power of a popular symbolic form to rectify what he saw as the moral faults of a war-intoxicated society. The Passion Week story gave the writer a narrative framework for a moral fable about the power of the free and equal individual, designed to strip the concept of nation from his culture’s imagination. At the pinnacle of his fame, Faulkner wanted to shape the nation, but his consciousness of his rhetorical task prevented him from effectively engaging public discourse. Still, for its moral intensity and the seriousness of its philosophical inquiry, A Fable remains a remarkable late achievement of high modernism. In an interview with Cynthia Grenier a year after the novel’s publication, Faulkner admitted, “I like the idea of the world I created being a kind of keystone in the universe” (1968, 223); A Fable, for all its faults, represents a serious “keystone in the universe” by a writer deeply attuned to the social, political, and moral dimensions of literature.